Denver Pay Plan Offers Lessons, Review Says

Some said it would devastate working relationships between teachers.
It hasn't. Others hoped it would dramatically raise student
performance. Not so far.

But Denver's closely watched experiment in performance-related pay
for teachers nonetheless is leaving a big mark on the city's school
system, as described in an extensive report released last week on the
2-year-old pilot project.

Although many questions remain unanswered, the effort is pointing up
the difficulty of putting such a compensation system into place, while
at the same time suggesting that the goals teachers set for themselves
may play an important role in their students' success.

"There really are some major learnings to be seen here," said
William J. Slotnik, the executive director of the Community Training
and Assistance Center, the nonprofit, Boston-based consulting group
that drafted the report as part of an ongoing study of the initiative.
"But I don't think we are at a point where we can say that pay for
performance is the way to go or that it's not the way to go."

Easier Said Than Done

Denver's unusual project has promised to add a missing piece to the
puzzle over how to move beyond traditional teacher-compensation
systems, which base salary on education levels and years of service.
Elsewhere, most new pay plans reward educators either for schoolwide
improvement on student tests or for showing through reviews that
teachers have acquired new skills.

But in the Mile High City, local union and district leaders agreed
to build a link between what individual teachers are paid and the
academic progress students in their classrooms make. At the 16
participating schools, each teacher works with administrators in the
fall to draft a pair of improvement objectives. Meeting the two goals
garners a bonus of $1,500. Many teachers, for instance, pledged that
specific numbers of their students would score at the proficient level
on certain tests by the end of the year.

That may sound simple enough, but the pilot hasn't unfolded exactly
as planned. For instance, organizers initially envisioned the effort as
a comparison of three different ways of setting teacher objectives. But
in practice, the goals set by teachers didn't break down neatly into
three discernible types, so the experiment's focus has shifted more
toward comparing the progress of pilot schools against that of other
schools in the 74,000-student district.

A major difficulty relates to the assessments available. Colorado's
state exam system isn't yet set up to allow for tracking individual
students' progress from year to year. And while Denver also uses the
Iowa Tests of Basic Skills, the commercially available assessment isn't
aligned with local or state curriculum standards. Plus, some subjects,
such as music and American government, aren't covered by either exam.
Teachers have made do with what they have.

"Denver now is having to grapple with some of the issues affecting
every district in the United States," Mr. Slotnik said, "which is that
the assessments we use are not necessarily designed for these new
purposes."

The pilot also has stretched the district's ability to maintain
information on student performance. One lauded byproduct of the
experiment is a new intranet system the district launched so that
teachers can now review extensive computerized data on their students'
academic histories. But Mr. Slotnik says more needs to be done to
coordinate the operations of Denver's assessment, curriculum, and
personnel systems.

Objective Results

Despite such challenges, the 150-page report suggests that the worst
fears about the pilot have not been borne out. A survey of teachers
involved in the experiment last year showed 87 percent agreeing that
cooperation among staff members had either stayed the same or improved
following the initiative.

"I think it flies in the face of the prejudice that says teachers
would resist this," said Brad Jupp, who has been on leave from his job
as a Denver teacher to help design the pay plan. Mr. Jupp's union, the
Denver Classroom Teachers Association, is an affiliate of the National
Education Association, which opposes linking pay to test scores.

Harder to glean so far is evidence on how schools' participation in
the program may be affecting student achievement. Results from the
first two years appear to show most pilot schools outpacing their
counterparts on the state's assessments in reading, but failing to keep
up on the Iowa tests. Few of the differences were statistically
significant, however.

In the meantime, a clearer picture is starting to emerge about the
importance of the teachers' objectives. Reviewers with the Community
Training and Assistance Center rated educators' written goals on a
4-point scale, based on such measures as how well they explained their
rationales and how clearly they spelled out their expectations for
students. Teachers whose objectives earned the highest scores were also
the ones who tended to see the greatest gains in their students'
performance.

In fact, that finding held true whether or not the teachers actually
met their objectives and won bonuses. Mr. Slotnik says it makes
sense.

"A lot of what goes into creating a high-quality objective," he
said, "are the same things that go into creating a high-quality lesson
plan."

Denver officials plan to continue the pilot through the 2002-03
school year, during which more research will be carried out to gauge
the program's effects. The expectation among district and union leaders
is that lessons from the bonus program will be used in crafting a
proposal for a wider-reaching system of performance-based pay for the
whole district.

"My personal feeling is that, as of yet, it has not had the kind of
impact it's got to have if we are going to have it be adopted and be
effective," said Lester Woodward, a member of the Denver school board.
"And that's really a big part of the challenge over the next two
years."

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